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not willing to bet my life even on very good odds
Saturday, October 5 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
For the last couple days I've noticed that Charlotte was a little lame in one of her front paws. Today it was worse, so I knew I shouldn't take the dogs on any particularly ambitious walks. Our parcel at Woodworth Lake is 43 acres, and if I stuck within a square area of about that size (a quarter mile on a side), that was an appropriate size. So today when I took the dogs on a walk, I took them down the Mossy Rock Trail to the lake, then along nearly our entire third of a mile of lake shore to our boundary to the northeast with Joel's parcel. Then I walked that boundary all the way to where it meet land owned by Adirondack State Park. I continued past that a little, going down a slope and then turning west to confirm that the three-parcel boundary between Joel's property, our property, and state property occured at the top of the Crank Cliffs, a set of northwest-facing cliffs with a strange collection of old plastic bleach bottles in a pile at the bottom. Those cliffs are one of three fairly impressive cliffs in the area, and today I walked closer to them to see what they looked like in detail. I noticed fans of excrement coming out of voids in the rock, indicating that porcupines, unsurprisingly, shelter there in the winter. From there, I found my way to the top of some low cliffs not far from East Bifurcation Creek and followed these back to Woodworth Lake and then back to the cabin.
I'd noticed that the spray foam I'd used to fill in the voids around the wire mesh that I'd used to chipmunk-proof the big plastic box we keep near our dock had continued to expand after I'd last looked at it, and now the foam was keeping the lid from closing tightly. This caused me to return later today with a pair of needle nosed pliers so I could reach in through the little voids in the mesh to pluck out plugs of foam. It took awhile to remove enough foam to allow me to crush the mesh in closer, but once I did this in the places where it was sticking out too far, the lid was once more able to close the way it needed to.
Back at the cabin, something about all the sand under the east-facing porch and deck beckoned and I started digging again, this time near the center of the east foundation wall where the roofed porch overhead transitions to a roofless deck. Down near the footings was where I'd laid my last horizontal sheet of inch-thick styrofoam, and I wanted to add more. The problem, though, was that the footings get further and further away as one goes south, and I was digging in an area where the footings were buried under nearly four feet of sand. To trench out the space for another eight-feet-by-two-feet piece of styrofoam was going to take an absurd amount of work. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy the brutish stupidity of digging out massive holes just to bury something and then fill them back in. But I'm just one guy and I have a finite number of weekends in my life, probably fewer in the future than the ones I've already documented here. So after initially starting a trench for a whole eight feet southward, I revised my plans and opted to instead dig out a trench from the foundation wall eastward to the central support pillar of the overhead deck. The thinking here was that, as I continue to remove sand from beneath the deck, the footings underneath its support pillars will need increased insulation against ever-closer atmospheric cold. So I dug all the way down until I found what appeared to be the gravel that the concrete pier for the timber support column was standing on. When I measured this pier, it was only 46 inches tall, which seemed a little short considering that, according to all the maps I then found online, footings should be five feet below the surface in the southern Adirondacks. This seemed to make the matter of insulating the footings around the pillars even more urgent, assuming they're all only 46 inches tall (and some stick out of the ground by as much as 12 inches).
Once I had the concrete pillar exposed all the way down to its bottom, I started thinking of all the soil pressing against it horizontally from the other side (the east). I didn't know what force that soil was applying, but it wasn't being resisted by any force from the west, since that was now a void. There was, of course, lots of pressure from above, and perhaps that was more than enough to keep the pier from suddenly toppling westward. But was I sure? I was down there digging in that hole, and if it decided to let go, that would be it for me. I thought the chances of this happening were extremely unlikely, especially considering the forces holding it in place from above. But it wasn't something I was willing to bet my life on. So I went into the nearby woods and cut a piece of long-dead (and very dry) wood of some unknown species (probably beech) to the length I needed to create a temporary diagonal brace between the top of the concrete pier and the bottom of an overhead joist where it met the cabin's east foundation wall. But even with that in place, I was too nervous to actually go in that hole and work given the scenarios that had played out in my head. So I decided to call it a night, with the understanding that if things were stable overnight, I could feel safe to work in that hole.
A panoramic view of Woodworth Lake today from the dock.
Click to enlarge.
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